“Training for trainers” – Sounds a bit weird, sounds interesting. An environment where the motto “practise what you preach” can be seen as quite appropriate. An environment with opportunities for learning, practising, socialising, ... This is what was established in Esztergom, Hungary from October 31st untill November 6th. Twenty five youth workers, Naturefriends and others, and five team members gathered at the Danube bank and got the thing going.

Halloween
Welcome evening was… hollow’s eve and it was visible. After checking in, the official welcome and some getting-to-know-eachother games we got to a “halloween dress up contest”. Everyone had to dress someone up, whom they didn’t know before, with improvised costumes and then present the created characters afterwards. After this icebreaker the scary bunch got into a welcome party and the most original/scary/freaky character was elected and won an authentic “Tesco halloween mask”. While digesting the first xperiences people slowly started going to sleep, dreaming about the fantastic
learning opportunities that the coming week would bring.

Every day ‘s another day
Hungary was/is the place to be. It is a pitty that we didn’t have much opportunities to get out. The entire week we had great sunnyweather, very cold though. When we woke up in the morning and got out we could
see the Slovak republic on the other side of the Danube and on our right side, there was some kind of ancient basilic. Most of the participants made a border-crossing
hike during free time, exploring the “great unknown” across the bridge. But the usual daily starter was a fifty metres walk to “our” cosy traditional Hungarian restaurant. No one of the staff talked English and we didn’t have any native speakers present so the conversations sometimes were quite difficult (and funny). After we had breakfast, still in need for some descent coffee which we only got in the first coffee break of the day, the programme started. The programme was quite diverse. The participants worked with “training” in different ways and on different levels. They were participants in a training, they had to plan their own training modules, they had the opportunity to practise their presentation/facilitation skills and they gave and recieved feedback about their own “performances” (and learned how to do this). All this together with some practise on how to adapt and
transfer at home hopefully (I’d say probably) results into more attractive youth work. After having dinner, there were of course the evening activities. Most of them were
organised by the social committee (some volunteers among the participants) and consisted of Halloween, games, guitar & singing,
border-crossing hikes… One lassic activity that has already proven its success and therefore could be (and was) repeated, is the international evening. The different countries were very creatively (re)presented, introducing their local habits, drinks and food (a theatre presentation, some dancing, a very popular “we love Belgium” song,
...). After these presentations, of course we could not ignore that consuming some of the food and drinks, rightfully deserves to be an essential part of an international evening.
All these informal time activities of course gave opportunity for socialising and resulted in a very cool group of people having fun together.

Me, myself & I
For me it was my first experience as a trainer and this brought me a lot. It is a challenging position being a trainer in a training for trainers. This is because (as I mentioned before) you have to practise what you preach. Maybe not the biggest but for
me the most surprising learning experience was the totally different behaviour you have to show/have, being a trainer. I learned to observe (because I had to) instead of immediately
throwing in my opinion and possibly
interrupting the forming of alternative
(maybe better) ideas. One very fun part of my training experience was the introduction of the presentation
skills workshop. I did the ntroduction
(energizer, dividing of groups and giving out a task) in a very confusing, boring (bad) way. The purpose of this was to show the participants how not to present something. But as they were not aware of that beforehand most of them were quite confused and some of them actually “bought the crap” and started working when I told them to, which was a quite funny situation.

Buffalo
One very remarkable game was brought up during the training. It is called the Buffalo game. The problem is that I can not tell you what it is about. This is a game, with rules of which you will only be informed of, if you agree to playing it FOR LIFE!! So if you are curious you can find out but you will have to take a risk. For the people already in the game: “BUFFALO”. Be honest if I got
you ;-).
Summary: a fantastic week with fantastic experiences (learning and other ;-). Just to be clear. This article is just a short bundle of reflections, mostly on the informal time activities. If you want to know more about what happened at the Training (contentwise), tthere is a participants report coming up ... soon.

Simon Standaert
CLIMB – Belgium
simon_standaert@hotmail.com